File spoon-archives/marxism-general.archive/marxism-general_1998/marxism-general.9801, message 12


From: nhelp-AT-juno.com
Subject: M-G: Facts About an Unknown Land
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 1998 16:16:30 EST


Facts About an Unknown Land

Author: possibly R. Daniels, 1946. Edited by NaKiVeD only in order to
add closure, completion and comments. 

The Soviet Union extends throughout an area of something over eight and
a quarter million square miles. In considering this area, nearly all of
our own conceptions are, in fact, drawn from that comparatively small
division of it which is in Soviet Europe; and, within that division,
from what we know of the capital and of the great 'regional' towns:
Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, Kiev, and the rest. Yet, of these eight and
a quarter million square miles, well upon six million square miles, a
division large enough to contain the three European states of England,
France and Germany twelve times over!, and the whole of Europe outside
the Union five times over!, no less than three-quarters of the total
area of the Union, lie not in Europe at all, but in the Soviet East!

Of this Soviet East, containing so very much the larger division of
Union territory, E. S. Bates, presenting a more authoritative picture of
the region than anyone else writing in English has ever done, says:

'No one person has ever seen all of it, much less lived in all of it,
yet. There exists no wholly accurate map of the region, not even in the
Soviet atlas, the finest atlas in existence.' ("Soviet Asia," Jonathan
Cape, London, 1942.) [At the time of Stalin.] 

Starting round about the mouth and middle reaches of the Volga, taking
in the autonomous republics and regions of the Chuvashes, Tatars and
Kalmucks, and extending southward, south-eastward, and north-eastward
across the Urals, the Soviet East contains a part of the Caucasus
(itself a small continent, probably the oldest in the world), the whole
of Central Asia (formerly Turkistan), the whole of Northern Asia, and
the Soviet Russian Far East. To the south-west, the frontiers of this
Soviet dominion are the frontiers of Persia and Afghanistan, to the
south and south-east, those of China, including Manchuria. In the far
north-east, they extend beyond the Arctic Circle. In the east, to the
Pacific Ocean. Second to the Jenghis Khanate Empire, this is the
greatest continuous dominion that has ever been known, open to the ocean
on two sides. Its share of those oceans is not navigable for almost all
of the year. It is the land with more great rivers than any other land;
but these rivers are mostly unnavigable, too: and the land's chief
shortage is of water. It is the land of all others rich in resources;
but the riches are as unmarketable as the rivers are unnavigable. It is
the land with the world's greatest roads; but the chief of these roads
lie buried under sand. Throughout million after million of square miles,
and far southward again, through immensities of primeval forest, forests
where daylight itself barely enters through which 'roads cannot be made,
and in which people cannot live or industries thrive; save only with an
almost prohibitive struggle', the great Siberian rivers, the Lena, the
Ob, the Yenisei, and a dozen others, alone provide the means of
transport and communication. Yet these great rivers, the mightiest
waterways of the world, the basin of each of which is at least as large
as the whole of western Europe, remain frozen throughout almost the
whole of their length for the greater part of the year. In spring,
released during a few brief weeks from their strait jacket of ice, their
waters race along in torrents; yet none of this flood water can be
drained off underground. 'In spring they are seas, in winter glaciers.'
'Half of all Soviet dominions lie in this frozen-subsoil area, where
only the surface ever thaws... leaving the depths below perpetually
frozen; a subsoil on which railway lines can hardly be laid, nor
buildings built, nor roads made, nor water pipes be dug in, nor
airplanes alight, with safety.' Southward again of this area is Central
Asia, whose landlocked shores and expanses of boundless steppe were once
the bottom of the sea; the most continental area of the whole earth; the
'land of thirst.'

All these are abysses of space: chasms into which millions of living may
be cast without awakening any more echo than the rolling of a stone into
a gulf. Here cities, once the capitals of fabulous empires, the Turanian
Khanates, are silted up with ancient, unaerated sand. Extinct volcanoes
rise like towers out of expanses of otherwise totally unbroken plain.
Tempests rage from October to March, hurricanes carry cyclones and
anti-cyclones of snow that devour all that the cultivator its labored to
achieve. Recurring famines ravage lands between which lie other 'Black
Earth:' lands of fantastic fertility. Here are regions in which for
sixty days it is unbroken night; and others in which, day in, day out,
summer and winter alike, there is an average of over twenty degrees of
frost. Here, north of the Aral Sea, in Central Asia, temperatures are
registered which, in January, are lower than in Moscow or Leningrad, and
in summer higher than anywhere else in the world, except only in the
Sahara, Arabia, and on the Equator! In the infinite, horizontal expanses
of steppe, unbroken vertically by a single tree or shrub, mirages of
cities hang above the corn. Locusts move in formations, like the
formations of armies when they invade. Mosquitoes darken the daylight,
winds cut like knives, and the sun, over oceans of dust and sand,
blisters and strikes yet does not warm. The sky, at night, instead of
vaulting the earth bears down upon and seems almost to touch it. Huge
stars, blindingly white and bright, hang so low as to seem magnified out
of recognition. Here, primeval as their own dark forests, taiga and
tundra, burning suns, eternal steppes, sky and snow, snow and sky, the
inhabitants (to name a few) of this immense world, Evenks, Tungus,
Manchus, Ostiaks, Samoyedes, Yakuts, tribes of the Amur basin and
Palaeo-Asiatics who inhabited the Far East before anybody else at all,
Kazaks, Kirghizi, Kara-Kalpaks, Turkmans, Uzbeks, lone fur-clad fishers
of the Arctic, nomads of the infinite plains, Buriats on Lake Baikal,
yellow-skinned Mongols off the edge of China, Pacific men from the north
of Manchuria and scores and scores of others, of their own free will
have altered nothing in their habits throughout thousands of years. They
evolved biologically, but not so much culturally.

For the small, settled peoples of Europe, orchardmen, farmers, city
workers, members of the learned professions, butchers, bakers, trade
unionists, back benchers, taxi-drivers, oil-and-color merchants, miners,
civil servants, and the rest, lovers of back gardens, frequenters by
preference of a single public-house, these oceans of dust and sand,
grasses higher than a horse and his rider, forests never penetrated by
daylight, oceanic slopes, lake floors and Polar drifts, are paralyzing
to the imagination. This reality, the everyday life of people in Kazan
and Saratov, Ashkabad and Tomsk, even in the very suburbs of Moscow, is
as remote from the Western observer as the dark side of the moon from
the star-gazer's telescope. The moon, indeed, is nearer to your ways of
thought: your own reveries and the reveries of your poets have brought
her within your orbit; luminous, familiar, predictable, almost akin: a
part of memory and experience, and accessible to your imagination. No
poet, no literature, no effort of imagination, could so compass, or fit
to minds shaped like yours, this Soviet East, except perhaps H. P.
Lovecraft when he wrote of Kadath! (H. P. Lovecraft: "At the Mountains
of Madness") Here, then, where what is unimaginable elsewhere may be the
stuff of everyday life, a far cry from Soviet Europe and further still
from your own knowledge of it and such centers of Soviet civilization as
Moscow or Kiev, lies almost entirely the background of the reality the
Bolsheviks had to deal with and deal in. It is within these unimaginable
expanses, against these wastes of snow and sky, beneath the blind roofs
of these primeval forests, along these ice-bound waters and across these
oceans of sand and steppe --and not against any background or stage
which might be even conceivably compared with what you know and
recognize-- events took place: events that made this land into a World
Power to be reckoned with; a World Power with space stations and space
science. For this reason, much that happened in the Stalin era must at
first sight appear startlingly unlike much else which received publicity
and slander from the West. It is that in each case, with each set of
facts, critics are dealing with only one aspect of a whole so vast as to
set a girdle half way around the earth: and which encloses within itself
peoples and ways of life more remote from each other than the peoples
and ways of life of, say, the Congo compared to Boston, or Paris, and
Oxford compared to Peking and the Amazon Jungle!

Within the boundaries of what is now the Soviet Union, there existed, up
to 1917, the Russian Empire. Prior to that, Khanates. (See "Empire of
the Steppes," Rene Grousset, NY, 1970.) Of this Empire, a Frenchman
named Paleologue, last French Ambassador to the last Tsar, writing of
the years 1900 to 1914, has left the following description: 'The Russia
of these years is not, as so many people imagine, to be thought of as a
country like some country of Western Europe might be, were it thirty or
forty or even fifty years out of date. It is not like this at all.
Scratch underneath the surface of the cultured St. Petersburg circle and
you are back in a country which is what a Western European country may
have been four and five and six hundred years ago - back before Western
Europe had its French Revolution, or its Reformation, or its Renaissance
- back to a country that is still in the darkness of the Middle Ages.'
Arthur Koesstler, in "Darkness at Noon," compared it more to the level
of New Guinea Savages! 

Within this Empire, and up to the very last hour of its existence, that
is, up to 1917, the population of more than one hundred and seventy-five
million persons was divided by both law and usage into five groups
called 'orders' or 'estates.' Of these orders, the first two, who were
the nobility and the upper clergy, had everything. The third, called
'honorary citizens,' were allowed to sit in. The fourth, which included
merchants, artisans, small bourgeois and some others, lived by favor of
the first three. But, still, these four orders, all added together,
amounted in number to slightly less than 20 per cent of the whole
population. The remaining 80 per cent,who made up the fifth order, had
nothing at all: they were the exploited on whom others lived. Living on
the land and cultivating it for a 'baron' or master (Kulak), the members
of this fifth order, until 1861, could be, and were, bought and sold,
bequeathed in gift, put up to auction, lost or won at play in exactly
the same way as the land itself or any other kind of livestock
maintained on it. After 1861, and the Bill of Emancipation, they could
no longer be bought and sold, or even legally flogged, but the same
solid line of demarcation as before continued to mark them off from the
four orders above them. As an order they were still the object of
special legislation, and a special administration presided over the
whole of their lives. In practice, up to the very last hour of the
Empire, that is, until well on into the closing period of the last war,
any member of the other four orders was still, in the eyes of the fifth,
a baron master; and any member of the fifth was a "Muzhik," or slave.

In 1914, when the Empire entered on its last and decisive war, 80 per
cent at least of its one hundred and seventy-five million inhabitants
were totally illiterate. Of the fourteen million Imperial soldiers
mobilized 'to fight Germany,' four-fifths could not have said, and had
never had the dimmest facilities for finding out, whether 'Germany' was
a man, a thing, a village, or a monster out of a fairy-tale...

In 1917 the Empire ceased to exist and it was upon the ruins of this
social system that Soviet civilization had first to rise and then to
persist. The Soviet system had to struggle to persist after inheriting
the aftermath of a particularly disastrous and demoralizing foreign war
which the Western Nations fought against them (including troops from the
U.S.A.), revolution at home and the bloodiest civil war in history; and
with further long years ahead of famine, typhus, cholera, and local
reversions to cannibalism. It is a tragedy and a struggle that the
Western World, to this day, not only fails to recognize and honor, but
continues to slander and debase. 

For the territories throughout which this New Soviet civilization was to
be spread the conventional geographical symbol 'Russia' is both
misleading and false. In the sense in which such terms should be used:
there never has been, and almost certainly there never now will be, a
geographical entity which may correctly be spoken of as 'Russia.' There
has been, and almost certainly always will be, an area of expansion,
radiating from Moscow, which has been styled successively a
principality, an Empire and a Union of Federated Republics; and which
has been conditioned by the initiative, military spirit and colonizing
genius of a group of people spoken of by the English until not very,
long ago, and by their neighbors in Europe to this day, as Muscovites.
They inherited this power from Batu Khan, the grandson of Jenghis Khan
and Khan of the Golden Horde, who gave the title "Grand Duke" to Ivan I
of Moscow. The Muscovites, or people living about Moscow, are the people
who in the fifteenth century established themselves in Novgorod; who,
with Cossack riders recruited in the Ukraine (and with the help of that
Cossack institution, the knout), reached out as far as the Urals; and
from the Urals spread themselves over the whole of the north of Asia
until, from the Volga to the Ob, from the Ob to the Lena, from the Lena
to the Amur and beyond, they arrived at the Pacific Ocean; and who have
since been the ruling class throughout successively acquired dominions
amounting to at least eight and a quarter million square miles, or
one-sixth of the whole land surface of the globe.

It is the members of this ruling class only who, more European than
Asiatic, though too not wholly European and differing greatly among
themselves, are Russian-speaking; and who think and speak of themselves,
and are thought and spoken of by the two hundred or more other races
under their rule, as 'Russians.' This Empire, radiating from Moscow and
carried first west and then east, to the Urals and from the Urals east
again, until it ended only at the Pacific, was consolidated for himself
and his successors by the greatest of all the Muscovite princes, Peter
the Great. His successors, if they parted in 1867 with Alaska to the
Government of the U.S., kept up the work of expansion by the annexation,
during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, of ten large
provinces in Poland, of Finland, and of the territories on either shore
of the Caspian Sea. From the time of this great prince onward, two
entirely different lines of policy were applied by successive Imperial
Governments to the very numerous non-Muscovite races brought under
Imperial rule. The first of these policies, and the one which
predominated down to 1880 and the accession of Alexander the Third, was
tolerant (within limits, and with the one very marked exception of the
Polish Provinces), of native customs and cultures within the Empire. The
second, paramount from 1880 onwards, was determined upon the
'Russification' of all minorities; a policy which profoundly injured its
own cause. Among the other legacies of the ruined Empire taken over by
the early Soviet Union, there existed in consequence a comparatively
new, practically universal, spirit of separatism, and a deep-rooted
tendency to see in every member of the light-skinned and
Russian-speaking ruling race a foreigner, a colonist, and an oppressor,
or a non-Turanian, and not a real Slav. (It is fair to note that the
Nazis were easily able to recognize on sight their "kindred folk," i.e.,
other Anglo-Germanic people living in the Soviet Union as settlers, and
were easily able to distinguish them from the real Slavs and other
Turanians.) 

These inherited difficulties of the young Soviet Union (or rather of the
Russian Bolshevik Communist Party who had assumed power and who were
creating the Soviet Union) were further enormously augmented by the
nature of what they had set themselves to do. The empire-builders had
been concerned only with the comparatively simple business of making
themselves rich; with the acquisition first of salt and then of sables
and then of minerals and then of wheat, and last of all, of the trade in
otter pelts which, in the eighteenth century and under the influence of
the Hudson Bay Company on the other side of the Behring Straits, was
beginning to push the little Siberian sables out of the market. Wherever
the territory and whatever the local divergences, the guiding principle
of the early colonists: parasites, vampires, thieves everywhere, had
simply been, "how much of what is here already can we, for our own
purposes, take out?" Their Soviet successors had bound themselves to the
accomplishment of something infinitely more difficult. In the process of
unifying and colonizing, which it now appeared must be begun all over
again, it was their intention not to take out but to bring in; and what
they meant to bring in, however much it might be machinery, implements
of agriculture, telegraph posts, electric lights, or other material
benefits, was also a new ethical conception of the universe and of man's
place in it, a new moral code and a new system of laws, for the People,
of and by the People.

The territories throughout which these conceptions were to be
disseminated occupy, as has been said, more than one-sixth of the whole
land surface of the globe. The human beings who were to embrace the new
doctrines numbered one hundred and seventy-five million, of whom 80 to
90 per cent were totally illiterate and who had a standard of living
abnormally primitive even in Asia and a social consciousness consistent
with a status legally identical with that of pigs and goats! They had
also to struggle against the climate, the fantastic brevity of certain
seasons, the ferocity and length of others, against the nature of the
soil, the fallibility of programs, and the hostility of the outer world.
Almost any extract taken at random from the works of Lenin, written
between the year 1921 and his death in 1924, may serve as an
illustration of the discouraging and almost superhuman nature of the
task which had seemed comparatively simple in 1917. 'Russia,' he
exclaims, when addressing the Tenth Party Congress in 1921, 'has come
out of the war in the condition of a half-dead man beaten nearly to
death... After nearly seven years of war, the workers and peasant masses
of our backward country are in a state of exhaustion rendering them
almost incapable of labor...' A little later in the same address he
speaks of 'a country radically ruined, and populated for the most part
by destitute peasants.' In his tract "On the Food Tax" he says: 'We
avoid talking about certain problems, we do not think about them, we
overlook them. Not because we are clever and strong, but because we are
stupid and weak. We are afraid of facing the bare truth, we prefer much
too often the lofty delusion. We repeat all the time that we are passing
from Capitalism to Socialism and forget who "we" are. "We" are the
vanguard of the proletariat, but the vanguard is only a small portion of
the population...' In another place he exclaims with even greater
discouragement: 'Glance only at a map of Soviet Russia! North of
Vologda, south-east of Rostov-on-Don and Saratov, south of Orenburg and
Omsk, and north of Tomsk, you will see abysses of space which could
contain dozens of large civilized states. These territories remain in
conditions patriarchal and/or half-wild, where they are not wholly
savage. And of the peasants lost in still remoter corners of Russia,
what is to be said! Everywhere, for hundreds of versts, primitive tracks
separate (or rather isolate) the villages from the railway stations:
that is, from contact with civilization, with capital, with large
industries, with the big cities. Is it to be imagined that under such
conditions Russia can pass immediately to Socialism?'

Confronted with ignorance and apathy, with obstruction, sabotage and
physical resistance, the Russian Bolshevik Communist Party found itself
committed to more and more military expeditions, more and more
industrial penetrations, and, increasingly and on a growing scale after
the death of Lenin, to more and more liquidations, pacifications, mass
deportations and purges and, contrary to what is written by Western
propagandists (including Robert Conquest), these happened with good
reason. 

Fundamental, and quite insuperable, was the totality of difference
between their conceptions of standards a human being sets himself in his
private, and particularly in his physical, life. Conceived of as little
more than cattle, housed as cattle, monstrously herded together in
hovels worse than byres, 80 to 90 per cent of the Tsar's subjects had
never known, and had barely even aspired to the standard's of human
beings. Tsardom at an end, their fingers had been taught to handle
intricate machinery and their tongues to repeat a new lesson, but for
the great majority the physical conditions under which they lived had
hardly changed at all. The new regime, intent on its vision of the
future, occupied in the present less with bodies than with minds, had
not yet embarked on transforming the personal habits left over from
centuries of serfdom, transforming the people themselves. The people
from this unknown and strange land lived separated from, yet EVOLVED
side by side with, the more familiar peoples and civilizations of the
Mesopotamian area and the Greco-Roman area of old.* 

Please refer to "Another View of Stalin" by L. Martens at Web site:
"http://web0.tiac.net/users/knut/Stalin/book.html" for further facts on
Stalin if you wish.

See post "China-1" for interrelations of Turanian Khanates with China,
an historical pointer. 

See post "Pentalectical Materialism" for a Satanic or Pythagorean
perspective.

See post on Matriarchy for hard-science facts about this system.

*Wicca is primarily grounded on an agrarian system with familiar
agrarian seasons, based on a lunar (moon) cycle and the sun and familiar
seasons. (I'm using Wicca because this is the oldest system, by whatever
name you wish to call it, that existed with a still-matrilineal
foundation where hunter gatherers just became agrarians, just before
patriarchy took over as a result of the type of conditions brought about
by these matrilineal people switching to agrarian life.) For one
example, what would a Vernal Equinox or Summer Solstice mean to people
who come from this Soviet land? There are places in the Soviet Union
where you can see the sun rise and set at the same time! There are vast
areas where there are two seasons: light and dark! Yet the Dark
Doctrines and a keen feeling for a Dark Force In Nature arose from these
peoples and NOT from the agrarian societies. (See post "All Things," and
"Dark Force in Nature" on website.) The most advanced form of Dark
Doctrine can be seen in "On Contradiction," by Mao Tse-tung. This is not
dualism, nor is it some worship of an archetypical being, god or
goddess, that exists "up there," or "down there." Dialectical
Materialism is the Dark Doctrine as applied to practical life! The only
hint of this Dark Doctrine existing within any agrarian societies (which
all became vast imperialist empires at one time or another) is in the
Esoteric cults that lived amongst them and this was all due to remnants
of the Naga People, the "Serpents": Turanians as can be seen by the
ancient mask of Hermes and an ancient Indian drawing of a Naga person.
What others made of these doctrines, either by trying to outright co-opt
them or pieces of them, or by trying to incorporate pieces into their
own superstitions, seems to have always become either a dualism or the
worship of a "Being." The closest the real Slavs come to believing in a
Being, and only when they were Christianized, can be seen by the Mother
Mary cults and the Dionysian, orgiastic Pan-like cults (as like
Rasputin) that existed in a small portion of the Soviet Union. Their
name for the Christian Devil was Peron. However the indigenous name for
their Dark Force in Nature is "Charnaya Bog!" This Charnaya Bog is not a
centralized deity-concept at all and is wholly unlike and unknown to any
stream of Indo-Aryan thought. Bog means God in Russian, but the word is
of Tatar-Tungusic ("Altaic") origins. Likewise, the Turanian concept of
Allah which exists in a larger portion of the Soviet people (due to
becoming Islamized) is wholly unlike the Semitic concept; and their
manner of living based on the Qoran is unlike the manner of living in
the Middle East amongst the Afro-Semites. Boga means "wise person" and
is similar to the Bog Woman of the Celts in their PRE "God of the Light"
days. And again, the manner of Buddhism practiced by these same
Turanians is nothing like the Buddhism of India or Tibet - it is wholly
Turanian in character and is recognized as "not Buddhism" by theological
experts. The rest of the population is Shamanistic but this is not to be
understood in the sense that Western writers think they understand it.
The Turanian people, genetically, are the most closely related people to
the Native Americans (Amerindians). The appearance, if one wishes to
know what is meant here, is also similar: take a look at moving pictures
(not drawings or touched up photos) of Stalin or Lenin for an idea, or
Alexander Lebed, the modern former head of the armed forces in the
x-USSR. Replace the suit and tie with a robe. Change the hair from a
Western style to, say, a top knot. These are clearly not Western people
or "Aryan" kin. In ancient Persia, the Turanians (called "Turia") were
the ancient enemies of the Aryas (Persians). Consider this when you
consider the abject paranoia and fear the Anglo-Western people have for
the Soviets: they'd call it the "Evil Empire." That's what the tyrants
in Persia thought and said, too. That Christianity (which happens to be
the main Western mind-set) is directly connected to Manichaeism (Persian
beliefs) and in its aspects and images almost identical to
Zoroastrianism with its anti-flesh "bodies of pure light" and its savior
Sosiosh (also Persian) is quite well known. The Persians believed that
the Turanians cursed them by making them into bodies of flesh and also
making the sun, which they worshiped, burn and hurt them! This is not
all that well-known. What this means, allegorically or literally, is
unknown. It is primarily this, in Western thought, a kind of phobia
about the flesh itself, one's own body, that persistently leads, like a
disease, to the desire for a savior and belief in fantasies. Such
feelings and beliefs do not exist in others. Is it genetic? Is it
cultural? ??

//end post//




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